Satya's blog

I got a new Model M keyboard from eBay. FedEx just delivered the box inside a plastic bag -- go FedEx! -- on account of the storm. These keyboards are so ... what's the opposite of fragile? They're so durable, it was packed in the carboard box with just a cardboard frame and no other packing material (besides the shrinkwrap -- original, I think). Normally this means minus a few points on eBay, but like I said, they're very durable.

Unfortunately this isn't a "real" Model M. It's made in 1997 and the part number is 42H1292. It's still the buckling spring design, though :-)

And it came with a mouse. An IBM-logo'd, 2-button mouse with no scrollwheel.

The BBC used the same stock photo (of a guy with a laptop) in two articles recently. Both are in the Technology section.

• Net address bug worse than feared
• Microsoft sees end of Windows era

To be fair, it's probably okay to use stock photos like that. It's not wrong. At best, it's funny.

I've ranted about irrelevant photos in news columns before.

Last updated: Aug 09 2008 16:33

People don't seem to get that computers are complicated. Insanely complicated. More complicated than any otehr machine they have ever used. Think TVs and VCRs are complicated? Simple, very simple. Think cars are complicated? Not as much as a desktop computer.

A co-worker used to work construction, but now does computer stuff. (Yeah, "stuff". Most people reading this would understand if I said what he does, but I'm not going to. It's work stuff.) So today I'm going to compare the complexity of building a house (a subject I know little about) with the complexity of a computer (something I know a lot more about, but by no means do I know everything.)

A house. What've you got? Walls, floors, roofs, studs, joists, beams, electrical, plumbing, *planning* the thing in the form of an architectural ... er, plan? Permits, zoning, and so on. Figuring out what's wanted, designing the thing. A garage? 1 or 2 car? Or are we talking condos/apartments/townhouses? (Servers, versus desktops.)

What color? Well, that's fairly superficial. A big job, but still can be done after the whole thing is finished and lived in for a few years. That's like asking to change the color scheme of a web site -- can be a pain, but doesn't usually involve a rebuild.

Oh, you wanted brick with aluminium siding? Not the concrete/wood with wood siding we've done, that you hinted at? And when we said "okay, we'll do concrete with wood" you said "yeah whatever I don't know much about those house things", and then you signed off on it? So you want us to change the basic structure of the thing, expect it to be done in 2 days while your in-laws are visiting, and expect it to be free/cheap because we "know about that house stuff"?

That's like asking for your PHP site to be designed in MySQL (real computer people are cringing now) when, in the beginning, you didn't care what we did as long as we did it in a week and it had "social networking, videos, email, and a forum blog". We threw together something slick in Wordpress, you liked it, but now you realise what you really wanted was a forum with a document sharing area. Tough noogies. And the weeks of meetings that you spent deciding on the exact shade of blue in the footer (or, the exact pattern of the crown molding)? Worthless.

Now say you want the kitchen at the other end of the house. Sure, we can do that. Oh, the laundry room too? So you want us to reroute the plumbing and the electricals (the 3-phase supply for the dryer), again in 2 days and cheap? Suuuure. That's the same as when you ask us if the site can have fine-grained permissions bolted on later. And it should support frames (What the hell? You're not qualified to decide that. That's like you asking for the house to be built with 1 room on the 1st floor, 2 on the 2nd, 3 on the third, and so on. It's stupid. It might work in some special case, but generally it's stupid.)

Now, about the materials and construction. Do you realise that the video card in your desktop has more components than your entire house? How many in your house? Let's count every sheet of wood, every 2x4, every pipe and fixture. Let's not, actually. Take a pipe. What does it take to build one? Does every inch of it have to be designed individually? No, you probably roll some steel, thread the ends, and voila, your basic pipe (again, my knowledge of manufacturing fails me). The video card? Yeah, okay, so you can take some standard components and fit them together. I'll give you that. I know it's not true, but fine, whatever.

Now, when you have a leak. Most times you can see it -- there's water on the floor, or whatever. Or your faucet doesn't. A memory leak? What do you get? Random crashes. The application hangs. If you're lucky, it'll be consistent. Otherwise, someone has to go in with a memory debugger or leak tester (in the case of the water pipe -- it's an acoustic device, I think). And believe me, the debugger is a lot harder to operate.

Take tools. When the carpenter re-uses his (or her. I'm not going there.) hammer on various projects, do you scream copyright violation, intellectual property violation, and so on? Does the plumber have to sign a non-disclosure agreement? Can your electrician use the experience gained on his next project? Sigh.

Back to trouble-shooting, which was supposed to be the point of this article. Something goes wrong with your house (computer). Do you call the police (helpdesk) and yell "help it doesn't work"? For that matter, do they say "try re-inserting the key (rebooting)"? Okay, so they say "what's the problem"? and you say "I can't use my GE (Microsoft)", meaning your fridge (word processor). Okay, why? In cvase of the fridge, it could be any number of things, from a stuck door to leaks in the freon. In case of your computer, it could be anything, from the keyboard down to the RAM. In both cases it could be user error or power failure. It could be a corrupt file or mold in the vents. Point is, in case of your applicance there are much fewer points of failure.

If it's a web site or web application I've built, the points of failure are much more. I can replace the RAM, but any number of lines of code could be bad in the web app -- and I have to find out where the errors are. I can't replace the whole app, can I?

I seem to have lost my point somewhere.

Update July 30 2008: I managed to put this more briefly on chat today: Fact is computers are complicated and need maintenance. You take your car in for an oil change every 6 months? Computers are 2 orders of magnitude (200 times for the proles) more complicated. That means an "oil change" every day, and a complete overhaul every 6 months.

Last updated: Jul 30 2008 10:38

I recently posted this on Usenet:

ObHarebrainedIdea: Why not use sunlight focussed through huge magnifying glasses to raise steam for power generation? Or at least help in raising boiler temperature?

Someone responded with a BBC article about a solar thermal power plant near Seville, Spain, which uses mirrors.

To which I said:

Same principle: rather than cover the whole planet in solar cells (sails?) in an effort to capture more energy, concentrate it in a smaller region.

If only I could figure out how to harness the temperature difference betwen outside air and the inside my parked car. I know about Stirling engines, but I need a device that:

a) I can buy at Walmart or equivalent
b) I can plug into an outlet in the house and it will provide power, the rest being made up by the grid. Or, put it between wall outlet and consumer device at least.
c) Other end of device can draw power from solar, Stirling engine, hydroelectric source (rain tank atop roof, e.g.), stationary bicycle, etc.

Today I made a baked egg casserole based on recipes I found on the internet. We need this sort of thing for the every-two-months team meetings.

From the other recipes, I found that a ratio of about 1 cup milk to 5 eggs works, and that's the basic idea of baking eggs. That the quantity I used, which feeds 2 or 3, but you can multiply that for more people.

You need cheese. Sliced or shredded will do. I used kraft cheese slices, torn into strips. A baking pan large enough to hold all the ingredients to a depth of about 2 inches is required. I used one that's about 5 by 9 by 2.5. Inches, because this is cooking. If it were chemistry I'd be using more precise quantities in SI units.

You can throw in whatever else you have. I used 2 slices of turkey (torn into small pieces), a pile of green peas, and a veggie burger patty (again, torn into pieces). Cook all this stuff separately before starting anything else. This is the "filling".

Spray pan with cooking spray (or butter, whatever it takes to keep stuff from sticking).

Add about half the cheese, maybe enough to cover about three-quarters of the bottom surface, if you're using slices. Pour in the filling, and put another layer of cheese. If using shredded cheese, sprinkle it in about the same quantity (estimate! this is cooking, not chemistry -- the difference being the precision of measurement, and you can eat the result if done right).

Now mix the eggs with the milk (or vice-versa) and blend. We're looking for uniformity more than anything else. Pour into the pan.

Put pan on baking sheet (I used aluminium foil). Don't bother covering, or cover it if you prefer. I don't know what that does. Bake at 300F for about 1 and a quarter hour (cooking times vary with oven and size of the pan). Make sure it's solidified. Cool it a little, and eat.

I swear the Sci-Fi channel is tracking my Netflix queue. Today I watched A Sound of Thunder (2004), based on a Ray Bradbury book. After the movie, I flipped through the TV channels and ... there it was, on Sci-Fi. Not the first time, but this seems an unlikely movie (not well-known, and starring a bunch of unknowns, aside from Ben Kingsley).

I was watching an episode of ... something yesterday, and that same expisode was on Sci-Fi channel later that night.

If Discovery or anyone shows a movie/mini-series called The Triangle (Sam Neill, Catherine Bell, and other slightly-known people), I'm going to suspect something.

I have an external HDD which connects by USB. Ubuntu Hardy will usually automount such devices when they're connected. Today it would not mount at all, and of course I don't know the device names to mount it manually (turns out it shows up as /dev/sdc, which I tried, which didn't work). dmesg and /var/log/syslog showed that the USB system was doing something, but it wasn't recognizing the physical device, let alone enough to give me a mountable device node.

After much googling, I did "rmmod ehci_usb". 'ehci_usb' was mentioned in syslog as new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address (number). After re-plugging the drive, it detected and automounted. (I had previously installed the usbmount package. I don't know if that affected anything.)

This post is Google-bait for anyone with similar problems, including me. I've had USB flash drives refuse to automount before.

Update: First! Check the permissions on the /dev/ node for the device (lsusb command will give you an idea of where to look, for Bus 002 Device 004 /dev/bus/usb/002/004 is it). Also check the group on that node, find out what groups you're in with the "groups" command, and chgrp it if you have to.

Last updated: Sep 14 2008 10:06

Motivational poster based on many others. Original image from wikimedia commons which attributes it to http://flickr.com/photos/sfllaw/507933411/ under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License (cc-by-sa-2.0). This poster is under the same license.

(Please do not link directly.)

Last updated: Jun 06 2008 11:45

Okay, user interface designers, when your transaxle fluid is various shades of red (not at the same time!), do you make the dip-stick:

1. a dull silver color, like the oil dipstick OR
2. a highly polished shiny black so the red blends right in

What idiot thought the latter would be a good idea?

Last updated: May 19 2008 18:01

I dislike those who think that just because something it a) animated/drawn, or b) science fiction/fantasy, it is for children. Or they think it's silly. Or they think it's beneath them.

I don't care if they don't *like* that sort of thing. That's different. You're free to not like anything, but don't tell me what to do about it. Don't tell me I'm silly for liking it. Thinking something is silly or childish just because of a) and b) above, however, *is* silly. If you do, I'm going to call your pet fantasy (or your fantasy pet, if you have one) silly.

Let me quote portion of Dr. Isaac Asimov's rant (italics his):

...and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.

It's just science fiction so it's allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It's just science fiction, so it doesn't have to make sense. It's just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noises and flashing lights.

He's being sarcastic, if you don't get it.

Went to Atlanta. Stayed at Hotel Hilton near the airport. Room had small roaches, had to move rooms. Hotwire says, 4 star hotels at 2 star prices. True, also get 3-star rooms. Was nothing special. Good view, the kid enjoyed watching aircraft. Hotel lobby etc were bling, rooms were ordinary. Shrug.

Indian restaurants were a waste. "Chat Patti" was way, way too spicy. Liked the Ikea store. Freeways were big, busy. Shrug. Saw tornado damage on tall downtown buildings. Ate at original Chick-fil-a in Hapeville. Parking in downtown is a pain. Driving anywhere is a pain, either freeways or lots of red lights.

Atlantic Station is a crazy place -- two levels of underground parking with a small-town-wannabe area above. In the middle of downtown.